THE MARINERS

by Pete Peterson for American Legacy. The Magazine Of African-American History & Culture (Spring 2005), pp.17-24.

In early 1942, when American men were swarming to recruiting stations, James Lewis, a bass-baritone, was poised at the start of a career in music. He had already performed on Broadway in the Hot Mikado with Bill Bojangles Robinson. Lewis knew that the Army and the Navy had rejected black leaders' new push for full integration. Having grown up in Alabama while witnessing racism firsthand, he recoiled at the idea of serving in a segregated armed forces. "The fundamental order of the day, and every day, in the military, was segregation, segregation, segregation," says Lewis.

But when he learned in the spring of that year that the U.S. Coast Guard was experimentally integrating small groups of blacks and whites at all levels and ratings, he signed up. So did Homer Smith, an Alabamian and former tenor with the all-black vocal group the Southernaires. The two men met at the Manhattan Beach Coast Guard Training Station in New York, each assigned to projects that hoped to promote camaraderie among the thousands of new" guardsmen.

Working in the public relations office, Homer Smith and James Lewis were given specific morale-building tasks. Smith was assigned the job of putting a chorus together. He signed up Tom Lockard, a baritone from California who had sung with the Los Angeles Opera Company but was serving the Coast Guard as a cook. Lockard sang for Smith in an empty galley and got the job. After his successful kitchen audition, the new recruit led Smith to Marty Boughan, a tenor from Missouri who had sung with the American Opera Company in Chicago. Lewis used his show-business savvy to book performing artists to entertain the thousands of guardsmen at the station. Because he also soloed for the Sunday radio show The Navy Goes to Church, he invited Smith's Coast Guard chorus for guest appearances. But due to wartime reassignments and time constraints, the chorus thinned out. So Lewis asked Lockard, Boughan, and Smith to sing solos, and he often joined them to perform as a group. Lewis says the versatile musicians could sing individually as well as harmonize standard hymns like "Blest Be the Tie that Binds," spirituals like "Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho," and selections from a wide repertoire of secular music.

Calling themselves the Manhattan Beach Quartet, the men, two black and two white, began entertaining at the training station with a program of patriotic pieces, pop music, and spirituals. They arranged tight harmonies, took turns with solos, and made all their decisions democratically. And they believed their racial mix reflected the new Coast Guard ideals as well as their own values.

We didn't have stereotypical images of black and . white," says Lewis. Lockard adds, "We didn't really think whether we'd be jarring anybody's sensibilities by singing together-two white and two black people. We just did it."

Once the Coast Guard's top brass had heard them perform, they renamed the musicians the Quartet of the United States Coast Guard and sent them out to sing at East Coast bond rallies and recruiting drives, hospitals and service clubs, and, with the Coast Guard Band, on the CBS radio program The Coast Guard on Parade.

For their part, the men ignored notions of racial separation. Lockard was Smith's regular guest on the Harlem YMCA handball courts; Lockard, Smith, Boughan, and their wives socialized often, recalls Boughan's widow, Alma. "We attended dinners at each others' homes, went to restaurants. Our families got along well together."

On a tour of the Pacific, with singing stops at hospitals, GI theaters, USO canteens, and mess tents in Hawaii and Guam, the men found little racial intolerance. "No one ever commented on our racial makeup," says Lockard. Rather, their sequestered audiences applauded the quartet's performances at the little atolls, sites of Long Range Nautical Stations that were too remote and too dangerous to be visited by civilian entertainers. "Some might ask me, 'Do you really live together, visit each others' homes?' and I'd say, 'Of course we do.' "

Still, back home the men rarely traveled farther south than Baltimore, and learned that even the nation's capital could be racist. Lewis recalls that on their first trip to Washington, they arrived at the posh Captain of the Port Barracks on the Potomac River after an appearance with the Navy and Army bands. "Seeing that we were a racially mixed group, the officer in charge would not by any means countenance blacks sleeping in the same barracks with white Coast Guardsmen. They moved two beds out into the corridor." Actually, Lockard adds, it was worse than that: "It was right outside the head [latrine]." The four mates found rooms elsewhere in the city.

On the other hand, some white celebrities and power brokers opened doors for the guardsmen: Eddie Cantor invited them onto his national radio show, New York's mayor Fiorello La Guardia welcomed them to City Hall, and the Brooklyn Dodgers' owner Branch Rickey asked the four to sing at special functions. "Rickey thought the Coast Guard Quartet was the way American race relations should go," says Lewis. In fact, he added, "Rickey vowed to us that one day he would break the color barrier in major league baseball. Years later he did, by hiring Jackie Robinson."

When President Roosevelt died, on April 12, 1945, the syndicated radio hostess Martha Dean summoned the quartet to sing mourning hynms. "We were probably at that time the most aired, the most heard, singing group in America," says Lewis. So when they were discharged from the service in December of 1945, the now-seasoned singers turned to commercial radio. Marketing themselves as the Mariners, they quickly won appearances on the top shows of the day hosted by Fred Allen, Paul Whiteman, Henry Morgan, and Jack Benny. In November of 1946 they signed a contract with CBS. As the first integrated group in the industry, they had their own program, Songs for a Sunday Morning, and sang backup for dozens of others.

Then they joined a highly promoted new CBS morning show, Arthur Godfrey Time. In a 2000 interview, 92-year-old Frank Stanton, a former president of CBS, remembered, "We didn't sit in our office and say, 'Let's start an integration movement.' It was a natural thing that Godfrey did. He had this group and liked their sound."

For each morning's live broadcast, the group constantly reworked arrangements and spent long hours rehearsing the close parts of their signature blend. But Smith found it difficult to continue the rigorous vocal workouts and decided to retire. At that point, Lewis recruited Nat Dickerson, a Georgia-born tenor and a graduate of the Juilliard School of Music who had been on Broadway in Finian's Rainbow. His pure tone and perfect pitch complemented the ensemble.

The first radio audience---"mostly housewives and taxi drivers," as Lockard describes them----warmed easily to Arthur Godfrey's relaxed patter and the singers' 'repertoire. They liked Godfrey's easygoing relationship with cast members. Within months, the show took over and held the top ranking on the nation's airwaves. When, in 1949, CBS began televising it, millions of fans saw, for the very first time, that some of Godfrey's family members were black, singing side by side with their white partners. "The fact that the group not only sang their own songs but also joined the cast in singing and dancing routines was, in the late 1940S and early 1950S, basically unheard of," says the biographer Arthur J. Singer, author of Arthur Godfrey: The Adventures of an American Broadcaster. Certainly, whites and blacks occasionally appeared together in films and on television, but such scenes were highly controlled, Lewis says. "It was always master-slave relations. But here was a no-holds-barred race mixing." For many black Americans, the Mariners signaled a change, perhaps even a call to tear down the walls of a segregated Jericho.

Mildred Bond Roxborough, a college student at the time, says that the sight of the two black Mariners interacting daily on an equal level with whites may have helped to reassure an uneasy public that integration "would not cause a revolution or a civil war." Now serving in her fiftieth year at the NAACP's New York City headquarters, Roxborough says, "It was a painless way of getting people accustomed to the concept of integration."

But segregationists did try to intimidate Godfrey and CBS. A handful of stations declined to broadcast the show, and the Daughters of the American Revolution, who in 1939 had barred the world renowned contralto Marian Anderson from performing in their privately owned Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., now similarly vetoed Godfrey's scheduled appearance, unless he agreed to exclude the Mariners. Godfrey found another venue.

Georgia's governor Herman Talmadge denounced the CBS program: "We are speaking of a complete abolition of segregation customs in these shows, which are beamed to the states of the South." But Godfrey, who himself had served in both the Navy and the Coast Guard in the 1920s, crafted a rebuttal based on the ideal of patriotism, which was printed in Ebony magazine at the time: "Would you kindly tell Gov. Talmadge for me that if these four young fellows could fight together through a war in behalf of our United States, where bullets didn't bother with segregation, that I'm afraid I can't bother with it either." The network showed no signs of backing down. The quartet had survived the counterattack.

An invitation to perform at President Eisenhower's 1952 inauguration signaled that the Mariners had quietly become a metaphor for equal rights. "We lived it," says Lewis. "We were the Declaration of Independence. We epitomized all of those words-brotherhood and freedom."

In the years that followed, the quartet thrived, booking concerts at such distinguished forums as the Philadelphia Academy of Music, the Chicago Opera House, and Carnegie Hall. The men appeared on Ed Sullivan's TV show Toast of the Town, sang at well-known nightclubs, and produced seven albums and 37 singles, one of which, I See the Moon, sold more than 700,000 copies. Ebony magazine called them "America's favorite quartet."

But then, on April 15, 1955, after nearly nine years together, Godfrey remade his show, dispersing most of his stars and writers. Viewers and listeners were appalled. Some critics said he was jealous of his cast members' successes outside the studio, citing his anger at the young singer Julius La Rosa, a rising star, whom he had fired on the air two years earlier.

Looking back, Lewis thinks that Godfrey, CBS, and the broadcast industry had finally succumbed to political pressure from segregationists. He points out that, despite being the most popular quartet in America, after the Mariners were fired, "We couldn't find employment anywhere else in the national radio and television industry. We faced de facto blacklisting.."

So for the next 15 months, the four musicians found themselves crisscrossing the country on a tour they called "Music U.S.A." But the strain of constant travel and long absences from their families led to the group's breakup. Over the next 30 years, although they stayed in touch with one another, their lives took different turns.

Marty Boughan, known professionally as Marty Karl, served as a minister with the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada, and as the executive director of Mission Services in Hamilton, Ontario. He died in 1998. Nat Dickerson became the manager of equal opportunity affairs for the Thomas J. Lipton Company in New Jersey, and rose to the vice-chairmanship of the Industry Advisory Committee for the Urban League in Bergen County, New Jersey. He died in 1999. James Lewis taught sociology and anthropology at New York University, Connecticut State, and California State University at Los Angeles. He was a national board member of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists; associate executive director of Human Rights and Human Relations for the California Teachers Association; and a member of the California Equal Education Opportunities Commission. He is now 86. Tom Lockard owned East Coast businesses before returning to California. He served as deputy clerk of the Superior Court of California in Los Angeles, before retiring in 1978. He is also 86.

At a joyful reunion concert in 1987, with tight harmony and group rhythm still fully in sync, the four graying men kept their arms around one another while singing "Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho" and other favorites they had first performed as young men. Later, they looked over 15 years of newspaper clippings and photographs, concert programs, and honors from the NAACP and the 1953 National Urban League for their efforts to bring about racial equality and integration.

"We always had the feeling that if we just stood there and sang, that the lesson would be there," says Lockard. "You'd be able to see what hundreds of words wouldn't accomplish, see and hear the harmony that could emanate from this group of racially divergent people. And it did."

Pete Peterson, a freelance writer and retired college journalism instructor, is at work on a documentary about the Mariners. He welcomes conversation with anyone who has known group members or seen their performances.

He can be reached at pete97405@yahoo.com.